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More About This Test

The AncestrybyDNA™ test provides ancestral estimates for the four founding populations: European, Indigenous American, Sub-Saharan African, and East Asian. The names of the four founding populations listed in your test results are used in a simplistic sense. It is important to remember that these “founding populations” really refer to a group of people with shared ancestry that occupy certain geopolitical areas with “blurred boundaries.” The term we use to describe your ancestral makeup is Biogeographical Ancestry, which is described below.

You may find that some of your ancestral proportions may not be what you expected. Interpreting your results in the context of your physical appearance is also discussed towards the end of this page.

Biogeographical Ancestry

In contrast to “defining your racial background,” the AncestrybyDNA™ test provides a statistical estimate of a person’s BioGeographical Ancestry (BGA). BGA is a means of expressing the proportional ancestry of a person that is independent of the various socially determined “races.” While race is often defined by social or political conventions (there is no biological definition of “race”), biogeographical ancestry describes populations that share similar DNA markers because of a shared ancestry, which may span a range of geographical locations.

Case in Point: Defining the European Population

As mentioned, the terms for the founding populations used in the test report are used broadly, in part for brevity and practicality. For example, our use of “European” population denotes people of shared “proto-European” ancestry, which includes not only populations residing in the European continent, but also the Middle East and South Asia. Our definition of this founding population is based on evolutionary and anthropologic studies which show that these peoples’ common ancestor arose from anatomically modern humans who travelled out of Africa about 50,000 years ago to colonize the Fertile Crescent area of the Middle East—what today encompasses the counties of Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, and including the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Thus, people residing in Europe, Middle East, and South Asia (India) share common ancestral markers dating 10 to 50,000 years ago. In testing various world populations, for example, South Asian Indians are found to have a substantial, but lower, level of “European” markers while Middle Easterners exhibit a higher level of “European” markers. In the AncestrybyDNA™ test, the average South Asian Indian exhibits 58% European ancestry, while Middle Easterners have about 80-90% European ancestry. Additional examples of test results from various world populations are provided on this page: Average Results for Various Populations.

Percentages and Physical Appearance

Individuals exhibiting physical characteristics of a population group generally have at least 30-35% identity with that group. For example, persons with an 85% European and 15% African generally exhibit few, if any, physical features characteristic of the African group, such as darker skin.

This is because the genes that determine physical appearance are but a very small percentage of the total number of genes in the genome. Thus, for all of these genes to have sequences characteristic of one group, the person would need to be of relatively high proportions for that group. The higher the percentage of African a person is, the more likely the areas of the genome that determines physical appearance will be of African origin.